


Heart and Sole

by Sinna



Category: DCU (Comics), The Flash (Comics), The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Jon's sass levels intended to be consistent with Magnus season 1, M/M, help I can't stop imagining Rogues as avatars of Smirke's Powers, this installment featuring Slaughter!Piper and Vast!Trickster
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-01
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2019-07-05 12:50:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15863970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sinna/pseuds/Sinna
Summary: Statement of Hartley Rathaway, regarding an unusual melody and an impossible man. Recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.





	Heart and Sole

Statement of Hartley Rathaway, regarding an unusual melody and an impossible man. Original statement given December 23rd 2007\. Recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

\--

Statement begins.

\--

When superheroes have been a part of your life for over 30 years, belief in the supernatural seems like a given. And yet, in all my years running around in various frankly atrocious green costumes, I’ve only ever encountered two things which were truly unexplainable. Yes, The Flash running around at the speed of sound seems like the sort of thing that should make me believe in magic, but the accident that gave Barry Allen his powers proved so easy to recreate that his fifteen year old nephew succeeded in doing exactly that. Superman is an alien whose powers are normal for his species, and Batman, well, as far as anyone knows his only supernatural power is ~~being incredibly rich~~ having an incredibly rich patron. So, most of superhero-ing (and supervillainy) really falls under the category of weirdly advanced science.

But I said there were two things I encountered which were unexplainable, even in that context. The first was the music. The second, was James Jesse.

I should start with the music.

I was born deaf. That’s an easily verifiable fact. There were plenty of newspaper articles and scientific journals published in the months after my parents spent a frankly absurd amount of money on a series of experimental surgeries to give me the ability to hear. One of them worked, and I was a cute feel-good story about a little disabled boy being “fixed.”   

When people ask what the first thing I ever heard was, I usually give them the boring answer: the nurses discussing the results of the surgery. I tell my mother it was her voice, and she knows that’s a lie, but it makes her happy anyway. Actually, the first thing I heard with my implants was my father. I don’t know what he was saying, I couldn’t understand a word of spoken English at that point, but his voice was raised in the angry tone he used when threatening people.

But that wasn’t the first thing I _heard_.

It started halfway through the recovery period for surgery number two. That one was a complete failure, and actually messed my ears up even worse. My current hearing aids still have to correct for the damages done by that mistake. One of those long nights, lying awake in unimaginable pain, I heard it: the sound of a pipe, playing a melody that made my blood shiver even then. At the time, I didn’t understand the sensory input. If I could have communicated to someone what happened, I’m sure they would have continued with that awful experiment, but thankfully I remained unaware that the sensation in my head was what would be called music. I dismissed it as a strange delusion, brought on by nearly three days in too much pain to sleep.

And yet, the melody remained with me. When we finally landed on surgery number six, which managed to pull me kicking and screaming into the world of the hearing, I was at last able to understand that it was a melody; that I had been _hearing_ , even with ears which could not discern a single sound. Years later, a doctor I mentioned this to suggested that perhaps the failed surgery had activated the auditory sensors in my brain, creating phantom sound input that processed as something resembling music. This seems a likely enough explanation to dismiss the entire thing as an odd, but scientifically sound, occurrence.

As I grew up, I became obsessed with music, and my parents reluctantly paid for a tutor to teach me to play the flute. During one of my early lessons, after it had been determined that my new oversensitive hearing gave me the ability to replicate any song after hearing it only once, as long as I knew how to play the notes, my tutor asked me to play a song I’d heard before, and she would try to guess it. I saw an opportunity to test whether my delusion had any basis in reality, and began to play the dissonant, piping tune I’d heard while laying awake in that hospital bed.

I only made it a few notes into the melody before she tugged the instrument away from me.

“Where did you hear that vile song?” she demanded.

Trembling, I told her I’d made it up, that I’d wanted to see if she would notice. She released me and fell heavily into the nearest chair. She was crying, and I didn’t know why. I tried to ask what song she thought I’d been playing, but she wouldn’t answer me.

The next day, I had a new tutor. The song remained in the back of my mind for many years, but I didn’t dare play it again for quite some time.

The story of my life is well documented, so I won’t bore you with the details. Long story short, I was kicked out and disowned after an explosive argument with my parents, lived on the streets for a while, and turned to a life of crime. In those days, we in Keystone City all felt like we lived in a bit of a comic book world, what with our own superhero running around, and costumed villainy was the way to go. I was young, angry, and desperate to make my mark, so of course I jumped right in. Called myself The Pied Piper and committed sound-themed crimes with a weaponized flute of my own design. I could create concussive soundbursts, and I eventually found out I could stop The Flash in his tracks with the right frequency. That was also around the time that I discovered my dream melody – as I called it – had an… unexpected… effect on the people who heard it. The ways the violence manifested varied, but every person who heard it enacted whatever cruelties they could. I added that knowledge to my arsenal and used it mostly as a diversion, but it began to bother me. People were dying because of me. Sometimes the results took weeks to come to fruition. And even The Flash couldn’t save everyone.

So I stopped using it, and tried to forget about it. I joined a loose alliance of Central City’s supervillains – The Rogues – and that’s where I met James.

James Jesse. The Trickster. He went by many names. As far as I know, Giovanni Giuseppe was his real one, if you’re interested in following this up. His history isn’t as well documented as mine, and most of the things generally taken as fact are just lies that no one could ever disprove. I’m not going to go through every little thing here and now. If I ever write a tell-all about Trickster, it won’t be locked in a dusty old archives – no offense to your institution, but James was always a show-off, and he would be insulted if I didn’t do it in the most attention-grabbing, cringeworthy way possible. Maybe an interview with Playboy magazine?

I will confirm that the circus stuff is mostly true. And he was genuinely terrified of heights, despite all the time he spent up in the air.

The shoes were bullshit. I asked him to let me look at them once, thinking that such a marvel of engineering could be useful inspiring my own inventions. He laughed and handed them over. The complex system of gears inside them did nothing except look very impressive and provide a hiding spot for a few sticks of bubble gum. I accused him of playing a joke on me. Wearing fake air-walkers just in case someone wanted to see the inside of them was entirely the sort of thing I could imagine him doing. He just grinned and leapt into the air in his bare feet.

He didn’t come down. He remained there, hovering a few feet above the ground and grinning like a maniac. My immediate thought was that he had some sort of backup device hidden in his costume somewhere, but I couldn’t imagine where. I demanded an explanation. He said there wasn’t one, but he could show me.

I was young, gay, and painfully single, and the hot blond acrobat I’d had a crush on for months was holding out his hand and offering me the secrets of his universe. Of course, I was going to take it.

And suddenly I was falling. It was the strangest sensation. The world felt like it was rushing past me at a thousand miles a minute, and yet it remained completely still. It took me a moment to realize that, like Trickster, I was now stood several feet above the ground.

“Is it always like this?” I asked, unable to hide my horror.

“Always,” he confirmed.

He set me back on the ground almost gently. I was shaking so hard I could barely stand. I had never truly understood the fear of heights until then.

“That goes away after the first few hundred times,” he told me. “Mostly.”

I didn’t ask how he could do such a thing. Maybe I should have, but at the time I was more focused on something else.

“You’re terrified of heights.”

“I am,” he confirmed with a shrug. “At least this way, I can choose when to fall.”

After that, Trickster’s grin looked a bit less maniacal to me, and a bit more terrified. It struck me that he could have simply walked away from the circus. He could have gotten a normal, boring day job and only had to confront that fear maybe once a year. If he’d done that, he wouldn’t have been my Trickster.

He wasn’t content with safety. He had to live immersed in his fear every day, until he made the terror a part of who he was and could function just as well as ever even within its grasp.

I don’t know how much you’ve heard over here about what happened, but you have to believe me when I say that none of us intended to kill Bart Allen. Not even Captain Cold, who can be downright vicious when he wants to be. When you play with the Flashes, you have to use deadly force to have even a hope of keeping up with them. We expected him to shake it all right off and round us up for Iron Heights. James and I would report back to our superiors about what the other Rogues were up to, and no harm done. Our game would continue the way it always had.

Obviously, that’s not what happened. Instead, we became accessories to murder and had to go on the run.

And then James died.

I still don’t quite understand it. There’s no way…

I should be dead. I knew Deadshot was there even before I heard him breathing in the distance. I knew, because I heard that same melody, even above the ever-present sounds of the train. I heard it, and I knew I was going to die.

I accepted that fact easily enough. I was almost looking forward to it. I figured Trickster could escape the cuffs easily enough without having to worry about me. But then…

It shouldn’t have been possible. He was falling. He was well out of the line of fire. It doesn’t take a bullet very long to travel less than ten feet.

Time slowed and stopped. The world seemed to expand and contract, knocking all the air out of my lungs. At the time, I thought the first bullet had already hit.

And then James was there, in front of me, and I escaped the encounter without a scratch.

He was dead before he hit the ground.

I don’t remember much of the 24 hours after that. I lost my mind. I remember talking to James – full conversations – even though I know he wasn’t there.

The next clear memory I have is of a place that… I don’t think it really existed. It looked like Hell. It smelled even worse. I was standing in front of the… thing… that had manipulated my life for the past… year, at least. The monster was laughing as it told me how it had arranged James’ death, and everything leading up to it, to drive me to despair. It said I was… marked… in some way, and it thought it could treat me like some wind-up toy: tighten the gears and set me loose on whatever it wanted destroyed. Well, it worked. Partly.

It wanted me to play that melody. The one that had haunted me since before I could hear. So I did. Tied it up in a Queen song. I thought James might appreciate that.

The monster wanted to make me into a weapon, and it succeeded. It just didn’t expect me to be a weapon it couldn’t control.

Whatever that thing was, it’s destroyed now. That entire place is destroyed. I didn’t expect to survive that. I’d never played the full melody before. The first few notes had always been enough to get a reaction, and deep down I’d always been scared that if I played it for too long the melody would infect me too. But I wasn’t afraid any longer. At that point, I would have been happy to die. So, I played my swan song. A requiem for the Trickster. Seemed like a fitting way to go out.

But something wouldn’t let me die. Instead, I stumbled out of an empty warehouse in Gotham City that morning. I don’t know how I got there. I was almost certainly in a desert in Arizona the night before.

I’ve changed, in the months since then. I keep forgetting little things. Sleep… food… breathing. People seem to walk right past me without noticing me.

They hear the music though.

\--

Statement ends.

\--

There are few things I detest more than America’s propensity for _superheroes_. Their propensity for super _villains_ is one of them. Hartley Rathaway, in his time, has been both, making him possibly my least favorite person on the planet.

As Mr. Rathaway mentions, his personal history is indeed well documented. Tim was even able to dig up records of his personal tutors. The flute teacher mentioned here, Ms. Alessandra Flores, was, at the time, a recent immigrant from El Salvador, following the volatile 1972 elections. She is now with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and refused to comment when we reached out to her.

Despite the in-depth records of his life, few of the details of the supernatural aspects of his account can be corroborated in any way. There is simply no proof Mr. Rathaway has the powers he claims. I refuse to take into account the post-it note attached to this case file insisting that a mild-mannered researcher throwing a coffee pot at a co-worker the day Mr. Rathaway came in to give his statement is in any way related.

Furthermore, the details related to Giovanni Giuseppe (assuming Mr. Rathaway is correct in giving that as his real name) are nearly impossible to verify. It can be confirmed in old newspaper ads that group called “The Flying Jesse’s” did indeed tour the United States, and pictures of the trio include a young blond boy of approximately the right age, but their disreputable circus collapsed over twenty years ago and there are no records to be found.

One thing provably false, however, is the claim that Jesse’s “air-walker” shoes were a fraud. During Mr. Jesse’s employment with the FBI, the shoes were stolen and used quite successfully by a teenager by the name of Axel Walker, who in recent years seems to have taken over Jesse’s identity as the Trickster.

This case does bear some similarities to case 9220611, if we believe that both cases are true, though I can’t imagine why the personification of war would show such interest in a child who, by all accounts, was quiet and gentle.

More likely, this is simply a series of coincidences given meaning by an unstable mind. Mr. Rathaway himself even acknowledges his grief-stricken state. What he fails to mention is the nearly two years he spent in Breedmore Mental Hospital after the murder of both his parents, a murder he in fact confessed to.

One other thing Tim managed to dig up, although he won’t tell me how he found it, and quite frankly I don’t want to ask. While Rathaway Publishing was on paper a perfectly legitimate publishing business, behind the scenes, Osgood Rathaway participated in a great deal of illegal arms dealing. Much of the money to pay for his son’s extensive ear surgeries must have come from this very lucrative side business.

\--

Recording ends.

\--

**Author's Note:**

> To the three people who might actually know both of these fandoms: Hello! Come talk to me about Rogues and Powers!  
> To the people who are just here for the Pipster: If you liked this go listen to the Magnus Archives I did my best to steal their format but Jonny Sims is a better writer than me.  
> To the people who are just here for the Magnus: I won't ask you to go read up on 30 years of comics history for me (unless you want to in which case I have recs) but thanks for checking out my weird thing and I hope you enjoyed it


End file.
